Quick Guide

How to use the HEAT plug-in inside of Unreal Engine 5.

UNREAL ENGINE TUTORIAL by Matt Aspland

Matt Aspland tutorial video for HEAT with Unreal Engine

OPENING THE HEAT PLUG-IN

• In your Unreal Engine project, Click 'Windows' in the menu bar at the top of Unreal Engine and you should see HEAT Plug-in at the bottom of the list.

Opening the HEAT plug-in

• Click the HEAT button () and the plug-in open in a pop up window.

HEAT plug-in within Unreal Engine

• In the upper right corner of the plugin pop up you will see the 'Sign In' button (). Click this button and enter your login credentials.

The cursor may not appear while trying to log In. Just start typing and it will start to fill in. This is a UE5 issue.

USING THE HEAT PLUG-IN

• Once you have successfully signed into your HEAT account, the plug-in will automatically display the animations included in the 'My Library' section of your profile.

• The library viewer in the HEAT UE5 plug-in works exactly like the web version of our platform. For more information on navigating our movement library refer to this section on exploring movements.

• Locate the animation that you would like to pull into your Unreal Engine project.

• When you select the animation you will see the preview viewport window expand on the right hand side of the plug-in.

HEAT UE5 plugin with animation selected

• Below the viewport you will see the Character selection drop-down menu labeled 'Import As:'. This is where you choose which character model you would like your animation to appear on when you drag into the Unreal Engine scene.

• To start let's select either T69H, our proprietary avatar, or the Unreal Mannequin.

UE5 HEAT character selection drop-down menu

Additional steps are necessary to use MetaHuman or your own user model, but once configured can be dragged in the same way as described here. Please refer to our User Model guide and our MetaHuman guide for further instruction.

• Once you have selected your model you can simply drag and drop the movement into your Unreal project scene! You can either drag and drop the 'Drag to Import' button () or you can simply drag and drop the animation card (gif) from your library!

Drag and drop straight from HEAT to Unreal Engine 5

• The Drag and Drop function automatically retargets to you character of choice. Your character is now in the scene and animated!

If this is the first time you are pulling in a HEAT animation, it can take a few seconds to connect the call to our API. Following the first call animations will load into your scene faster with subsequent animations.

• After being dragged into your scene all HEAT animations are converted to Animation Sequences within Unreal.

• You can access these animation sequences for use in the content browser at the path: All -> Content -> HEAT_Animations

Location of animation sequences within UE5 content browser

Next we will go over using the Animation Sequencer within Unreal Engine to blend multiple HEAT animations together.